1,720,994 research outputs found
Exploring Critical Thinking Development through Dialogic Discussion of Literature in English for Academic Purposes
Full text linkCritical thinking is a key objective of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). Relevant elements of criticality in this pedagogical context include inference, analysis, evaluation, and synthesis. These are also important elements of argumentation which, in an EAP context, are typically addressed through engagement with expository texts. For effective critical thinking development, instruction should be purposeful, persistent, explicit, contextual and personalized.
Against this backdrop I conducted a qualitative study in a foundation EAP university class, which explored ways in which critical thinking may be expressed in dialogic discourse about and around literary texts. Central to the study was a six-month classroom intervention, which took the form of a weekly reading circle. This discursive context allowed participants to engage in Quality Talk, a dialogic approach to text-based classroom discourse designed to enhance critical-analytic thinking and argumentation skills. A multiple case study design facilitated examination of the critical thinking development of three focal participants. To analyze the data I employed a triple-pronged interpretive strategy which drew on Quality Talk, relevance theory, and abductive inference.
The findings revealed several ways in which the focal participants expressed critical thinking. Chief among these was a progressive development in argumentative reasoning, evident in the steady qualitative improvement of participants’ elaborated explanations over the duration of the course. This increasing sophistication in reasoning appeared to be fostered by the lively dialogic atmosphere, in which divergent viewpoints were both encouraged and challenged. Not only did participants’ arguments become more substantive as a result, but notably more cogent. Another key finding was an improvement in participants’ critical thinking dispositions, reflected in an increased propensity towards inquiry and reflection. These outcomes demonstrate both the value and efficacy of a literature-based discussion forum in EAP pedagogy, which bolsters the case for making such an instructional approach an intrinsic part of an EAP syllabus
Taking Literature and Language Learning Online : New Perspectives on Teaching, Research and Technology
No full textThe use of literary texts in language classrooms is firmly established, but new questions arise with the transfer to remote teaching and learning. How do we teach literature online? How do learners react to being taught literature online? Will new genres emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic? Is the literary canon changing?
This volume celebrates the vitality of literary and pedagogic responses to the pandemic and presents research into the phenomena observed in this evolving field. One strand of the book discusses literary outputs stimulated by the pandemic as well as past pandemics. Another strand looks at the pedagogy of engaging learners with literature online, examining learners of different ages and of different proficiency levels and different educational backgrounds, including teacher education. Finally, a third strand looks at the affordances of various technologies for teaching online and the way they interact with literature and with language learning. The contributions in this volume take literature teaching online away from static lecturing strategies, present numerous options for online teaching, and provide research-based grounding for the implementation of these pedagogies
Social Identities in Transition within the University: EFL Teachers Negotiating Learner Autonomy within Japanese Higher Education
Full text linkThis research examines how learner autonomy manifests across cognitive and social perspectives in language learning and proposes a new framework bridging the gap between autonomy and agency. This study suggests that learner autonomy is part of the Habitus that students can draw upon in pursuit of agency within a dynamically changing social field, where teachers are also undergoing professional transitional change, and where the field is framed by institutional policies and wider societal trends. I scrutinise the relationships between these different perspectives using empirical evidence from semi-structured interviews with 35 students and 42 EFL teachers from 12 different universities across Japan. I explore how the teachers' own lived experiences shape these conceptions and influence their professional practice. The imperative for this exploration comes from a desire to understand the apparent contradiction of Japanese university students being portrayed in the literature as lacking learner autonomy while also demonstrating individualism and resistance to authority through non-participation. This seeming contradiction and the resultant discursive gap is reflected in the learner autonomy literature. This discursive gap between cognitive and social perspectives is also evident in the wider educational literature as well as in the EFL literature more specifically with little agreement. I present a new framework for analysing learner autonomy that plots its influences and application across different levels from the cognitive level of developmental psychology, self-determination theory and the motivational ideal self, to the broader social level of socio-cultural theory, framing, social capital, and the field. This new framework makes a unique contribution to knowledge in the field by bringing together cognitive and social perspectives of learner autonomy and language learning, such as those of Holec, Dam, and Little, with sociological concepts of framing, Habitus, field, and social capital, such as those of Bernstein and Bourdieu, within the wider educational system
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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